Metro E

Hey all, have a question for those out there who have dealt with Metro E deployments. The company I am with supplies and manages cpe devices for a number of clients and it looks like we are going to start supporting Metro E handoffs. It doesn't look like we'll have anyone going over 10meg at this time so I was thinking a cisco 1841 router. I have been reading up a good bit on the different equipment out there that people are using but most of them are in the 2800-2900 or 3800 arena with routers. Switches seem to be the 3600 and 3700 series. From the performance charts the 1841 looks like it can handle that and still perform a good number of services before getting hit to hard. Why go switch over router also for this scenario or vice versa?

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ehnde

Switch > routing because this gives the customer the freedom to do the routing themselves. You can support site to site connections and direct internet access (p2p and DIA) with vlans (802.1q tunneling).

This winds up being easier to support and just gives your sites more flexibility.

Chipsch

None of the customers do routing behind the cpe equipment. They pretty much just drop a netgear or whatever staples/wal-mart switch they want behind the cpe device. We typically provide any NAT, DHCP, VPN, etc.. at the cpe for them.

ehnde

Chipsch wrote: »

None of the customers do routing behind the cpe equipment. They pretty much just drop a netgear or whatever staples/wal-mart switch they want behind the cpe device. We typically provide any NAT, DHCP, VPN, etc.. at the cpe for them.

That's the beauty of it - they can use a Cisco 7600 series router, or a belkin gateway.

I work for a service provider and that is how we run things. Routing is up to the customer

ehnde

phoeneous wrote: »

Can you elaborate on this a little? What type of switches are you suggesting?

We use Cisco ME 3400 Series Ethernet Access Switches - Products & Services - Cisco Systems

Occassionally I see sites using 3550s or 3560s

Also these:
T-Marc® 250 Series - Telco Systems, a BATM company

tiersten

Chipsch wrote: »

HIt doesn't look like we'll have anyone going over 10meg at this time so I was thinking a cisco 1841 router.

I would choose another router. The 1841 is only rated for a single T1/E1 when using all the features such as firewall etc...

It is also EOL and very nearly EOS. You shouldn't really be doing any new installs with EOL equipment.

ehnde

tiersten wrote: »

I would choose another router. The 1841 is only rated for a single T1/E1 when using all the features such as firewall etc...

It is also EOL and very nearly EOS. You shouldn't really be doing any new installs with EOL equipment.

How about a Cisco 871, would that be a good choice?

Chipsch

tiersten wrote: »

I would choose another router. The 1841 is only rated for a single T1/E1 when using all the features such as firewall etc...

It is also EOL and very nearly EOS. You shouldn't really be doing any new installs with EOL equipment.

Turns out that management has already decided what will be used for the MetroE connections. I ended up speccing out the new 1900 and 2900 ISRG2 routers for DSx connectivity. Curious to see what they chose. We don't use all the features by the way. Most of our customers end up getting a dedicated firewall if they need one or we've even dropped in a box with Pfsense for them. Pretty snazzy firewall actually.